Electronic sensors are widely used for maintaining the safety, security and operation of industrial equipment and machinery. Developments in sensor technology allow industrial and other sensors to communicate with one another and/or control systems via various communications networks, including the worldwide web. The interconnectivity of sensors and components sometimes introduce security risks from malicious attacks (such as hacking, faking of sensor data and signals, etc.). In industrial control systems (ICSs) an absence of security at the sensor level has contributed to the success of attacks sometimes resulting in security risks to the public health, security of international enterprises, and the environment. When sensor data is corrupted or unavailable, regardless of whether the data is corrupted accidentally or deliberately, operators of industrial control systems (ICSs) can be virtually blind to the lack of information needed to make critical operational decisions, which could lead to catastrophic loss of life, property, or national security.
Some current sensing systems may provide security features for sensor data. When security is provided by the sensors, the security is often left to the high-layers of the network communication stack. With this approach to data security, current sensor security platforms may not guarantee authenticity of the sender. It may be difficult or impossible to determine whether the received sensor information is unaltered from the original transmission, or originates from the original transmitter at all. Since signals may be intercepted and falsified and/or altered, data integrity may be compromised because the receiving device does not know if the information originates from the authentic sensor and if the data is unaltered. In some rare instances when security is implemented at the sensor level, for example with electronic seals used in nuclear safeguards, security is often implemented using symmetric cryptography. However, symmetric cartographic keys also pose security risks that cannot be easily mitigated and may be burdensome to manage, such as, for example, potential exploitation, loss, and/or compromise of the symmetric key(s) when accessing the sensor in an untrusted or hostile environment.
Current sensing systems may also fail because sensor data may not be continuously available in prolonged disaster scenarios, due to the sensors' reliance on continuous external power. If these systems are operational at all by battery back-up, the power consumption demands of current devices are often high, due to the computational complexity of current methods of encryption. Such devices may not provide for continual autonomous operation by battery power for periods of time extending to weeks, months or even years.
It may be advantageous to provide an autonomous sensor platform (ASP) that provides data integrity, availability, authenticity, and layered security of the entire system using asymmetric data encryption at the sensor level and multiple layers of data and device security. It may be also be advantageous to provide an ASP that can provide for autonomous sensor data availability for several years without an external power source.